I grew into the field of design from professional backgrounds in analytical science and theatrical storytelling, along with habits of tinkering, sketching and asking questions. As a designer, I get to draw insight about the world as much through interpersonal empathy as quantitative data. Then I get to improve the world based on those insights, using an evolutionary process of solution-invention, prototyping, testing and modification, which demands both imagination and rigor.

I recently graduated from the User Experience Design Immersive at General Assembly and I have previously taken the Human-Centered Design course through +Acumen and IDEO.org.
download my resumé →find me on Bēhance →

Designing for specialized marketplaces means understanding the needs of a particular audience with particular goals. In creating an e-commerce site for a school uniform company, I recognized the opportunities and challenges that differentiate it from a conventional online clothing retailer. Because school uniforms are generally a required purchase, True Spirit had the chance to save screen real estate from the pervasive "internal advertisements" of other sites, and focus instead on making the experience as good as it could be for busy parents who want their shopping flow under their control and organized around their needs.

Features I invented in response to customers' context included (1) lightweight profiles for different children you can switch between at will, and add as much or as little information to as you go, (2) an ever-accessible shopping cart, and (3) dynamic filtering.
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Intrepid Travel: Bringing the safe adventure of group travel back to the booking experience.

Finding and booking a group tour online is a delicate process for a would-be traveler—she is taking in a lot of new information and keeping multiple different factors in mind to find the right trip. A group tours company has to maintain for her the spirit of adventure and sense of security through all the detailed arrangements. After all, a would-be traveler has about four other browser tabs open at the same time, with comparable options from competitors.

A team of us—experience and visual designers and researchers—redesigned the online experience of group tour company Intrepid Travel. Our innovative and appealing ways to explore options keep site visitors engaged in the process and protect them from feeling dead-ended.
read case study on Bēhance →

Boston.com is the web presense of The Boston Globe that focuses on local news and events. This broadly-read site is in process of a revamp, section by section. They gave us the mission of redesigning their weather page to increase engagement and reinforce their local identity as "the voice of Boston". Through intensive research, testing and ongoing client interaction, we generated tens of unique design possibilities and several new features, and iterated multiple times on the best ones.
see designs on Bēhance →

How do you make a backyard playground that will grow along with rambunctious, capable young kids? I found out in a two-person, two-day reconnaissance-design-build-play mission. Our solution involved modular cubes of all possible permutations of faces that could be stacked, crawled through, hidden in, climbed on and augmented over time with rope, tarps, wood, bricks and anything else the kids find and are drawn to.
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Theater holds the thrill of putting myself wholly into a thousand other souls, the challenge of reaching and deeply communicating with a crowd of strangers sitting in the dark, and the feat of keeping the story-arc moving and the visuals in mind, while staying precisely in one moment, one mind. From acting, to playwriting, to devising puppet dramas, the theater is for me exercise and expression—fundamentally collaborative, and also essentially personal.
download my acting resumé →check out the plays I have written →

I host "creativity jams", each time with 20–40 people from all different disciplines and backgrounds attending to work on creative projects, find collaborators, learn from each other, and enjoy the atmosphere of co-working. I have inspired others to hold their own creativity jams.